Words While We Walk Together

By Tonia Teresa Healey

About the Book
Words While We Walk Together is a collection of poems and prose exploring themes of light and dark, love and loneliness, and the fullness of life uplifted by family and friends. All of those themes are given unique and powerful expression as individual voices are blended into this collective work.
This collection is a book about healing. It is about the need for and possibilities of continual, deep, life changing healing. Written by poetry therapist Tonia Teresa Healey this work is a part of her vocational calling and personal witness to the power of poetry to assist with our everlasting need to heal the mind and spirit.

About the Author
Tonia Teresa Healey is a retired Psychiatric Nurse, living in Narragansett, Rhode Island. She is a certified Poetry Therapist of the National Association of Poetry Therapy. After becoming a nurse, she attended Brown University where she did an independent concentration, titled Poetry as a Therapeutic Process. She is also an “Army Brat,” having grown up all over the world with her dad.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RoseDog Books
• Release date: Sep 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798891270459

Book preview

Introduction

There is nothing better than a good walk!

A walk can clear the mind and invigorate the body. It can get us to where we are going or leave a nuisance behind. It can follow the straight and narrow or meander the crooked path. More often than not, we walk in circles. Ending up right back where we started.

From our first steps to our last, walking is a wonderful metaphor for the journey of our living. We mark time and space by how we navigate through it. Our walk is sometimes a crawl, or a run, perhaps even a dance.

Better still, is when we do those things together — when we walk together.

Words While We Walk Together is a collection of work by and for Tonia. It marks the intersection of paths through the years, of experiences along the way, and of people and places of importance.

Walking Toward the Light

Walking in Search of Possibilities

Walking in the Darkness

Walking with a Love

Walking at the Water’s Edge

Walking with a Friend

Walking with My Family

Walking Toward an End

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All of the works in the book were composed by Tonia T. Healey except where authorship by friends and family is noted.

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Walking

Toward the Light

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Getting to Brown – Trauma and  Resolution

Getting to Brown was a story in itself! I was already 35 years old, had 2 boys, was divorced from my husband Jack, had worked as a nurse in various settings, including Mass General Hospital ICU and finally moving back to RI. I was working at the Mental Health Retardation Hospitals, State Institution For Mental Health, sometimes-double shifts to pay the mortgage & support my children. Jack had become an alcoholic having not passed the final step in the Foreign Medical School exam so he could practice medicine in this country. I bought a house in Warwick RI to be closer to both families for support, and went to work at the MHRH. I was pregnant with David at that time. After about three years, still working at the MHRH the union there went on strike and there were picket lines and angry protestors but the nurses went to work. As I was going into the institutional grounds, workers were blocking the roads yelling and hitting my car with sticks, I panicked and pushed down on what I thought was the brake pedal, but it was the gas pedal! Propelling my car into the crowd. I went through the crowd and pulled over to the side of the road, only then did I know that I had hit someone! The police and rescue came and I was taken to the station.

I was tried in Superior Court charges were, Involuntary Vehicular Manslaughter and since I didn’t know the outcome of the trial, I had to prepare for the boys for an indefinite time in someone else’s care. This was the most difficult thing I had ever done. Neither of the related families could accept the responsibility for them so with the assistance of a friend and Doctor who had delivered both boys we found a great home for them with his friends.

When it was over, I stood before a judge who said, I have to have you serve time to send a message to the unions and to you that this behavior will not be tolerated. My sentence was thirty days in the Women’s Prison in RI and